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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23370484">vague statement</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/seoryoungs'>seoryoungs (orphan_account)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>NU'EST</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - College/University, Coincidences, Gen, I Tried, seongwu and kenta are here for like five seconds each lol</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:47:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,686</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23370484</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/seoryoungs</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He bolts around the side of the bookcase, scattering his pile of textbooks onto the floor and nearly knocking his head against a shelf as he does so, but he’s met with eyes that are maybe kind of familiar. Like he’d dreamt them. Or maybe like he’d seen them every day for a month when he was twelve and then never saw them again.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Choi Minki | Ren &amp; Kim Jonghyun | JR</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>OBSCURE SORROWS FIC FEST</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>vague statement</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>lilo (n.) - a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if no time had passed since you last saw each other</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Minki moves into his freshman dorm room without much fanfare. His mom helps him carry the cardboard boxes up the stairs and the two of them create a stack in front of the bookshelf, and then she leaves him to unpack on his own. There’s a hug between them but it’s brief and it’s passing, and neither of them will miss each other much. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He moves to tie back his hair, a habit left over from when it reached his shoulders and that still hasn’t faded despite wearing his hair short for three years now. He laughs at himself - he doesn’t even have a hair tie - and sets to tearing open the boxes with his hands as best he can, because he’s packed the scissors in one of the boxes and doesn’t feel like wandering the halls to find someone with a box cutter. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Minki has a roommate. His roommate’s name, according to the construction-paper nametags on the door, is Kenta, and they know nothing about each other because the roommate Minki was </span>
  <em>
    <span>supposed</span>
  </em>
  <span> to have had cancelled his enrollment two weeks ago. That had been a fun phonecall for his dad to take in their kitchen, in front of everyone. Kenta isn’t here yet, luckily for Minki, because he has a lot of boxes and no way to open them in a timely manner. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>What? He’d packed a lot. His dorm room was going to look fabulous, and it was going to feel like home, dammit, because his parents always got weird about the posters he’d Blu-Tack up to his walls and so Minki would take them down even though they didn’t tell him he </span>
  <em>
    <span>had</span>
  </em>
  <span> to in so many words. Here, no one would be able to tell him to take his posters down, so he was going to put up inserts from Popteen Magazine and all five of his Madonna posters, and he’d brought these nice curtains he’d found at the Dayton-Hudson besides. It was odd, decorating his side of the room so intensely while Kenta’s side was empty and bleak, but Minki throws himself into it and before he knows it it’s been nearly three hours. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kenta is still not here. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s fine, though. Minki really and truly does not care (well, maybe he does a little, he’s been going mad not talking to people all day), and he has to go to the campus bookstore besides. He has a pre-mailed list of required books and a credit card acquired a month back. Kenta will be there when he gets back. Probably. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>The summer after Minki turned 12, his parents splurged and they went on a cruise for the whole month of July. Minki made the friendship of a lifetime in the swimming pool. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>It happened like this. Minki does not look before he jumps (both metaphorically and off the literal diving board) and very nearly jumped on top of another boy. The other boy’s name was Jonghyun and he was scared to tears after Minki almost landed on him, but at dinner that night Minki’s mom marched him over to apologize. Minki was having none of it. He half-assed an apology and the two of them met a third time an hour later, sneaking fondue chocolate out of the fountain because neither of them liked bananas and also their parents hadn’t said they could have dessert. It’s a friendship built on teasing, first just from Minki but Jonghyun joined in after a week. They spent all of their time together. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The course books are on the first floor of the bookstore, and Minki finds what he needs quickly. Sociology, Japanese, History, Music Theory. He has a stack of seven books in hand when he notices the staircase going down to the basement, where apparently non-school books are sold. He hears voices down there. There’s a number of unfamiliar accents down there, but he recognizes one cadence as a Gangneung dialect. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>It wasn’t just Minki-and-Jonghyun the entire summer. There was Minhyun, too, a Busan boy like Minki who was taller than all of them, and neat despite the fact that they were all twelve. Minki thought Minhyun was very pretty, then, and he suspects the girls their age on board (there were a few of them) thought so too. There was Dongho, a round-faced smiley kumdo student from Jeju who enabled all of Minhyun and Minki’s bad jokes. And there was Aron, a couple years older, who spoke halting Korean with an American accent as thick as the layer of butter Minki would spread on his toast in the mornings. Each one of the five of them was never without one of the others. A favorite pasttime of the five of them, originally taken up out of mockery, was learning each other’s accents. Minki and Minhyun would talk in heavy Busan satoori to bother the others, but then Aron started picking up on it and so they started copying his American accent to make fun of him, and the rest followed from there. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>That’s not why he goes downstairs - no, really, he does want to look around and see what books they have. He doesn’t know why that summer has been all in his head today. Maybe it’s because that was the last time he had to make entirely new friends, with no one he’d known since preschool around to rely on as even a casual acquaintance. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Minki has to be careful going down the stairs because of the stack of books in his hands, but he succeeds, and wanders off into a corner to parse through new fiction releases. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>They said that they’d all become pen pals at the end of the summer, but that’s not really what happened. Instead, Minki and Minhyun hung out every few months, taking the trains and meeting in the middle of Busan, and as far as the two of them knew everyone else fell to the wayside. They went to rival high schools and would go to sports games for the sole purpose of seeing each other, and they wrote Aron a letter once when they were fifteen and mailed it but never got a reply. Maybe, Minki thought, he moved. Maybe, Minhyun thought, it got lost in the mail between Busan and LA. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Someone on the other side of the bookcase is talking. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I feel like young adult books all have the same kind of titles. It’s all either, vague statement, ominous single word, or string of nouns. One of three formulas.” The person pauses. “Vague Statement. That’d make a great book title itself.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span> It’s a stupid joke, a bad joke, and Minki rolls his eyes, and then he stops short because he hears someone </span>
  <em>
    <span>else</span>
  </em>
  <span> on the other side of the bookcase laugh at it, and that laugh is familiar. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kim Jonghyun’s laugh the way Minki remembers it was distinctive and bubbly and maybe a little grating, and the laugh he’s hearing now is just the same. He bolts around the side of the bookcase, scattering his pile of textbooks onto the floor and nearly knocking his head against a shelf as he does so, but he’s met with eyes that are maybe kind of familiar. Like he’d dreamt them. Or maybe like he’d seen them every day for a month when he was twelve and then never saw them again. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The mouth below those eyes says, real slow, “Choi Minki?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Minki lets out a breath and says “Oh thank god you remember,” all one phrase just like that, and then he realizes that his books are all over the floor and he realizes it the same instant that Jonghyun does and the two of them bend down to pick them up except Jonghyun loses his balance and falls on his ass and Minki remembers Jonghyun being really, really clumsy that summer and so he starts laughing and then Jonghyun starts laughing too and then they’re both laughing and they can’t stop. The poor guy who’s here with Jonghyun looks a little confused. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Minki starts picking up the books and it feels normal. “This is Seongwu, by the way,” Jonghyun indicates, “my roommate.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nice to meet you,” Minki says, and Seongwu says, “Hi.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You - are you going to check out? Because we aren’t really doing anything here, you can - I mean - we can hang out and I can - we can wait for you,” Jonghyun stumbles out. His sentences were always like that, Minki remembers, tripping all over each other. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’s almost surprised by how easy it is to tell him yes. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The three of them walk across campus together to drop Minki’s books in his dorm room, and Minki’s too drawn into the conversation to really ponder how weird it is that he and Jonghyun just fit together again like this after six years. Seongwu is funny, personable, the stereotypical extrovert, and Jonghyun’s humor is just like Minki remembers. It’s seamless, the three of them. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Minki’s room is on the fourth floor, and the elevator is understandably busy what with everyone trying to get their boxes moved in, so it’s a hike up the steep and narrow stairs. Their three loud voices - because yes, Jonghyun is loud too, which Minki finds odd because he had remembered Jonghyun to be shy, but it’s not the bad sort of odd - bounce around the concrete ceilings and create a cacophony which he’s sure is bothering everyone else trying to move in but it doesn’t matter to Minki, being a noisemaker never has. It’s joyful, and there’s nothing wrong with that. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kenta is in the process of moving in when Minki enters, and as he slams his precarious stack of books onto his desk he looks over at the walls on Kenta’s side and is pleased to notice that Kenta, too, has posters of Western pop icons covering the eggshell stucco. They’ll work well together, he decides. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Seongwu stays behind to chat with Kenta - “he’s trying to make friends with all of campus before convocation,” Jonghyun tells him, “and honestly I think he’ll succeed” - and so Minki and Jonghyun go back raucously down the stairs, together. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>shiloh? writing a college fic not set at mhc? it's more likely than you think</p><p>the "vague statement" thing is based off a conversation i actually had with my best friend thanks ivy for the inspo lol</p><p>i kind of attempted to set this in the 90s? and i think i failed? but its fine though. also the cultural setting is a weird korea-america hybrid universe because im never sure how to set my fics decisively in one country or another when its kpop fic lmao</p><p>this was a sorrowsfest fill! thanks again to the mods for organizing everything &lt;3 </p><p>i'm on <a href="https://twitter.com/vivasunn">twitter</a> and <a href="https://deep-hearts-core.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a> come find me!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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